The Ionia Sanction Read Online Free Page B

acceptable bride. It was a conversation I cringed to recall.
    Diotima disappeared without a trace. I was eventually driven to ask her mother, who told me she’d left for Ephesus. My girl had been a priestess of Artemis in Athens; now she was a priestess at the Artemision in Ephesus. I didn’t have to ask why she’d gone, nor why she’d left without a goodbye. I hadn’t heard a thing from her in the three months since. I’d thought never to hear from her again.
    Pericles said to me, “You’ll be able to see her when you arrive.”
    I wasn’t about to tell Pericles the last thing I wanted was to see Diotima. At least, not until I’d worked out what to say to her.
    “Oh, and Nicolaos, you are invited to a symposium tomorrow night, at the home of Callias.”
    Callias? He was the richest man in Athens; a man far above my station. “Whatever for?” I asked.
    Pericles snorted. “Callias has about thirty years’ more experience with foreign missions than you do. Whatever advice he has, I suggest you take it.”
    *   *   *
    Any other man, when he’s been wounded in battle, visits a doctor at the gymnasium, an expert in treating sword cuts, spear punctures, broken bones, and bruises. The doctor tends the hero’s honorable wounds while his comrades in arms stand about, recounting his bravery on the field of battle and singing his praises.
    I, on the other hand, having risked life and limb in the shadowy world of investigation, went home to my mother.
    Phaenarete is a midwife. She sat me down with a bowl of hot water and a clean rag, and used bronze tweezers to pull out the splinters in my arms, one by one, all the while describing my various defects, intellectual and physical. It was a long list. Whenever she made a particular point she squeezed harder and I yelped. My mother told me not to be a baby.
    When she finished she applied a sticky, smelly lotion to my forearms and told me to lie still and let the lotion soak in, or I would die of the flesh-eating sickness. “Which would be no less than your own fault,” she sniffed, and walked off, leaving me to feel sorry for myself.
    I’d ritually cleansed my hands in the sea while I was at Piraeus. That allowed me to eat my fill, so I had a slave girl bring me yesterday’s bread soaked in wine, with olives, figs, and cheese. I lay there digesting, which gave my mind all too much time to replay the disastrous scene with Pericles and worry about my future.
    I’d known Pericles would be angry, but the strength of his backlash had shocked me. I hadn’t noticed during the argument, because I’d been too concerned for myself, but now I recalled the dark rings under his eyes. His movements, always graceful in public, had been twitchy in the privacy of his office. The voice of Pericles was the most beautiful and serene instrument the world had ever heard, but with me he’d had the grating, angry tone of a cornered man. Pericles had looked and sounded like a man under pressure, and no wonder.
    Pericles had come to the leadership of Athens at a moment of extreme crisis, when our new democracy had been only days old, and the man who founded it had been murdered. In the wake of the murder the city might have collapsed in civil war, but Pericles had stepped into the breach and saved us.
    Pericles had inherited a city that barely functioned. Men loved the new democracy, but they didn’t know how to run it. Citizen committees had sprung up. It would have been nice if some of the committees had actually worked. Men couldn’t agree, officials overstepped their powers, gaps appeared where everyone thought someone else had been responsible for something. Fingers pointed in every direction. The democracy was like some giant machine with levers that didn’t fit and not enough oil to stop the friction. Pericles spent his days being the oil. He went from one committee to another, to persuade where he could, correct where he had to.
    Then too, many cities had taken advantage of the